"Is she going to be?"
"I don't know," Lauren said. "I don't know. I don't think so. I'm going to call."
"There's no phone," said the blind man at the card table. "They took the phone out in November." He had a Finnish accent, soft and flat, the vowels laid down carefully like boards. "I am Arvo," he said. "Arvo Kivisto. That is Tomo Bilich in the chair. He doesn't talk much, because he can't. This one is Mossy Mahaffey, who talks for everybody. You can sit, miss. There's a chair by the desk. It's Johanna's chair."
She sat in Johanna's chair. It was a little wooden rocker with a crocheted cushion, and it was the only thing in the room that had nobody's things piled on it.
They told her. It took a long time, because Tomo couldn't talk more than a few words at once and Mossy kept going off down side roads into which shift boss at the Leonard had been a son of a bitch and which a saint.
They had lived in the Carrigan Rooms between them for a hundred and forty years. Tomo Bilich had come in 1931, from the island of BraΔ, in Dalmatia, by way of a cousin in Anaconda, and had worked underground at the Mountain Con until 1962, when his lungs quit, and had lived in Room 14 on the second floor for fifty-two years. Arvo Kivisto had come from Hancock, Michigan, in 1938, to the Belmont, and then the Steward, and lived in Room 31. Mossy Mahaffey had come from Leitrim by way of Boston in 1946, the year after the war, and gone down the Leonard, and in 1951 a skip had come down on his leg at the twenty-eight-hundred-foot level, and the Company had paid him twenty-two hundred dollars for it, and he had lived in Room 9 ever since, on the ground floor, because of the stairs. None of them had married. None of them had children. Mossy had nobody, and said so cheerfully, as if it were a hand of cards that had turned out about the way he'd expected.
In November, when the state inspector condemned the boiler and the city ordered the building cleared, Tiernan Carrigan had come around to every room himself, the four men and two women who were left in it out of forty-two rooms that had once been full, and sat on their beds and explained it. Mossy said this as if it were important that she know it. "He came himself," he said. "He didn't send a lawyer or a cop. Tiernan came himself, every room, and sat down." Carrigan had found places for all of them. Old Seamus Healy had gone to the county home on the Flat, and Arvo was to go there too, because of his eyes. Mossy was to go to a room at the Finlen, which Carrigan would pay for himself through January. And Tomo was to go to Galen.
"Galen," said Tomo from the chair, and that was all he said for a while.
Everybody in Butte knew about Galen. It was the state hospital past Anaconda, built for tuberculosis, where for fifty years the miners with the con had gone at the end. Her father's brother Matej had gone to Galen. Her father had driven out every Sunday for a year and a half, and then one Sunday he came home after midnight and never said Matej's name again.